Friday, March 02, 2007

CoDe's Sedna Issue

I got my Sedna issue of CoDe magazine the other day, and just finished reading through it. I was a little excited when it came in, and was rather pleased with the content. This was their third Fox Focus issue (why not more?). Articles by Doug Hennig, Bo Durban, Rick Schummer, Rick Strahl and others dove right into some of Sedna's great new improvements. Although most of the content wasn't "new" -- in that I, like most VFP developers, have known about these wonderful enhancements for some time. But it is great to see them in print, in an issue especially designed for Fox.

I do admit that I skimmed over the VFP to .net stuff. I'm just not interested in porting my VFP applications to .net. Whenever I read through these sorts of things I just find myself frustrated, puzzled, and dismayed all at once. First, moving to .net would require a complete re-write. Second, I've developed a few .NET apps in my day and still feel that VFP (for many projects) is light years ahead of .net. Of course, I'm excited about the new C# (my .net language of choice), the cool features of the Development Studio, and LINQ. But for a Fox Focus issue, it would have been great to umm... focus more on Fox! But I digress..

Now that I have that off my chest, I'd like to comment on a few of the articles I found most interesting. First I was really happy to see Rick's article "Visual FoxPro Web Services Revisited". Rick gives us the goods on the Web Service Client process, ASMX, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and the status of SOAP. Communicating with the Web has never been fully straightforward in VFP, but with a little guidance and shove once in a while, future VFP development using Web Services looks bright.

Craig Boyd ("Welcome to the Future of Deployment") and John M. Miller ("Integrating VFP into VSTS Team Projects") show us how to use some of Visual Studio's coolest features with VFP. Craig discusses ClickOnce -- a deployment technology allowing you to do installs and upgrades on the Web -- and how you can use it with VFP. This is a must read for anyone looking to update their distribution strategy. The company I just started working for is just beginning to do Web installs (after years of mailing CDs). This is one of the first articles I'll be showing management.

Miller's article really took me by surprise. Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is Microsoft's SDLC tool integrated into Visual Studio 2005. Although I haven't used it in the past, this article sparked my interest. VSTS promises to help manage the often difficult task of integrating resources on complex projects. The only problem is that VSTS is a .net thing, and really not designed to use non-dotnet tools out of the box. However, as John explains, you can use VSTS extensibility features to make it happen. Thanks John!

Lastly, this issue is packed with little sidebars and tidbits. Things like ClassBrowserX, Scrollable containers for VFP, and GDIPlus-X. I think this issue has also inspired me to join CodePlex and maybe jump on one of the VFP projects (at least as a tester).